5 Tricks to Boost Progression

There’s something about Cosmo-inspired titles that amuses me to no end. I was seriously tempted to use “5 Tricks to Sexify your Progression” but figured it may be misleading. Didn’t want people to expect a post on how to flirt during raids and be disappointed upon discovering that there’s very little sex in this post. (Now that I think of it, Sex and the Raid would make for an awesome blog title. If I ever go under as a paladin blogger, it’ll be my backup plan.)

Anyway, nothing here is revolutionary. Not revolutionary nor complicated. But I’ve noticed that a lot of guilds don’t use these tricks and would progress much more smoothly if they did. Even casual guilds. Especially casual guilds.

1- Have a pre-raid discussion thread

A thread on the guild forums, 4-5 days before the raid. A couple of words about the night’s destination, some links to boss strategy guides and a few words about the guild’s choice of strategy if it’s a new fight. The thread can also be used for sign-ups, sign-outs and “I clicked tentatively on the calender but XYZ” if you don’t already have a system in place.

The goal is to save time. Makes planning the roster smoother and shortens pre-fight boss talks. Yeah, not everyone reads the forums, but if you answer every question with “what do the forums say?“, the anti-forums crowd kind of gets weeded out.

2- Set specific times for invites, first pull, breaks and raid end.

Human beings do really well with deadlines. If there’s no time to be ready by, no one will be ready until you specifically tell them to be ready. Unless they’re keeners. And if you’ve played WoW for any amount of time, you know that WoW players are rarely keeners.

Set times for breaks and the end of the raid are important too. If players don’t know when they’ll be released to go to the bathroom, they’ll go whenever. And if they don’t know when they’re allowed to shut off the computer, they’ll wander off before you want them to.

3- Don’t stop outside of scheduled breaks

You wouldn’t answer your phone or head to the washroom in the middle of playing soccer would you? So what makes it acceptable during a raid?

As soon as someone goes afk, even for a second, it triggers a chain reaction:

If you want to actually, you know, kill stuff, the only reasons anyone should ever go afk outside of a scheduled break are emergencies and kiddie aggro.

Your raid is full of people with active social lives who are frequently interrupted or people with bladder infections who are constantly on the pot? Schedule more frequent breaks.

4- Use World of Logs

I can’t imagine how anyone raids without World of Logs. Looking for death/wipe causes, damage distribution, points of improvement… WoL is a must if you want to get the most out of your time.

The great thing about WoL is that you don’t even have to be involved in the raid leading to have your own account. The WoL website has instructions on how to get started. If you want to learn more about log deciphering, check out the right side of this blog. Scroll down enough and you’ll find a few posts on the topic.

5- Have a post raid discussion thread for each raid

Debriefing after a raid is essential. Every raid deserves a nice thread on the guild forums with a link to the night’s logs, strategy review, constructive criticism (post-raid CC is especially useful since it’s not as heat of the moment as mid-raid CC, it can be clearer and more thought out) and any “I totally shat my pants” comments you might want to get off your chest.

Like managing raid logs, posting a raid debriefing thread on the forums doesn’t necessarily have to be done by a raid leader or guild officer. It might take awhile to catch on (and even then, it’s usually the same two people posting their comments), but people will read those threads and will refer to them in the future.

It’s So EASY!

It’s all about efficiency. Whether the members of your WoW circle are juggling crazy schedules or whether they have all the time in the world, you want to spend your raid time raiding. Not waiting on everyone else, not trying to figure out what’s going on and not making the same mistakes time after time because there’s no written, permanent form of communication.

Adding dedicated threads on the forums, having a clearer schedule and using a logs parsing tool are really fast and easy tricks to stop wasting time and get around to killing stuff for nice, sexy lootz.

18 Comments on “5 Tricks to Boost Progression”

Sex and the Raid, as a parody of Sex and the City. I’d probably get some interesting spam on that one though!

In between flasks is a good time for breaks, yeah. I get annoyed when we break 15 minutes into a flask. Those things are expensive! But different guilds go at different paces. My first guild rarely breaked at all, my second guild took a 10 minute break in the middle of the raid and my current guild breaks more or less whenever someone wanders afk (which is often).

I’m pretty upfront when I start dating people that I’m not to be bothered on certain days between certain hours and it goes over really well. Have yet to have someone move in with me though, so I don’t know how easy it is to enforce in the house. I wonder if the average guy is better at respecting hobbies than the average woman.

I think it depends on age. I’ve noticed the girls around my age (mid 20’s) seem to have little respect for things they don’t understand. Thusly, they try and distract from games and on to something they know better (much to our dismay -_-).

As far as breaks go, if it’s after the first hour of the raid, and someone asks for a break, I’ll normally tell everyone to take 5. If people ask before then or soon after the break is over, I’ll tell them “We’ll be taking 5 after this attempt” or “When we get to the boss.” Some nights, we have a solid 2 hours before anyone needs to run to the bathroom, other nights we end up taking 2 or 3 breaks in our 3 hours of raiding. I like being able to adjust to people’s needs, or keep up momentum if we’re on a roll and no one needs to stop.

I still like knowing ahead of time exactly when we’re going to break, even when running 10s. I get irritated when we take breaks every time someone has to go to the bathroom. We waste so much time that way. Unless someone has a bladder infection, they can go for 90 minutes without visiting the can.

using WoL and a postraid discussion really helped our teams lately while struggling on Cho’gall. I was looking up specific things on our parses and used that in a forum thread after the fight and it showed me exactly what / and who / went wrong.

It allowed a few things:
1. more than just me to see the problems / challenges
2. get feedback from everyone on things we could each to do improve

We still haven’t downed cho’gall (holy mana drain) but this week will be our 3rd attempt :)

I completely agree with the importance of using World of Logs to analyse the fight afterwards. I never understood how a player who is doing less dps than another player of the same class in a guild can be ok with it and not want to find out why. World of Logs makes it so easy to see where you are falling down that there really is no excuse.

I find that these sort of questions are better asked within spec and class. If the Fire mage is beating the Arcane mage but they’re both on top of their rotations, it’s forgivable because the point of specs is to be different. If, say, a warlock using Demon spec and Incinerate-centered rotations is being beaten by one in Demon who spams Shadow Bolt between DoTs/CDs/procs… you have a point.

A lot of real life stuff has prevented my guild from progressing like it has in the past, we just don’t have the same kind of time every week. Thing is, I see a lot of what little time we do have squandered by constant AFKing from a small handful of people. Its hard to want to b**ch at someone for it, not always knowing the reasons, but in raids its frustrating when 9-24 people are constantly waiting around for one.

In any case I think I’m going to try your advice and crack down on it. I’m a mom myself, I know stuff happens and stuff comes up, but damn – we probably waste an hour a night of the 2 nights we raid. Its taxing.

When it’s kiddie aggro, you can’t really blame people, but it is nice when parents announce “baby aggro” before running off to put their toddler back to bed.

Random AFKs are sometimes a point of contention between my guild and myself too, but I’m the new kid, so I’m not in a position yet to ask people if they can wait 10 minutes until the break. I have noticed that our raid leaders have been a bit stricter lately though ^_^